Top all-time · #3968
Paris Buttfield-Addison
Personal blog · hey.paris/posts · on HN as parisidauaigameswriting
Paris Buttfield-Addison's personal blog at hey.paris covers ai, games and writing. Since 2025, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paris Buttfield-Addison's post about Apple locking his Apple ID after a gift card redemption. It is cited as a cautionary tale about account lockout, passkeys and reliance on Apple's ecosystem.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison's personal website. Paris is bestselling author, and co-founder of Secret Lab, Yarn Spinner, and West Coast Space Centre.
Most-linked posts?
- Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help15 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2025-12-13
- The Empty Promise of AI-Generated Creativity3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-03
- Beyond Bad Output: The Deeper Problems with AI in Creative Work2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-11
- Australian bank gives out customer phone to another customer by asking ChatGPT2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-12
What Hacker News says?
Update posted at https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ : Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card…
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”Submitted Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help as a story · 1748 points
HN discussionI've added a few updates on the original post, but there's no fix yet: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ Feel free to chat to me on Bluesky ( https://bsky.app/profile/hey.paris ) or Mastodon ( https://cloudisland.nz/@parisba ) or email if you have ideas. I've received nearly 500 emails!
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”Submitted Wise refuses to let us access our $60k AUD as a story · 184 points
HN discussion> notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them. The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..." headers. Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style.
Comment linking /posts/cba/
on “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”Submitted The Empty Promise of AI-Generated Creativity as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article . It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if y…
Comment linking /posts/genai/
on “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”Submitted Australian bank gives out customer phone to another customer by asking ChatGPT as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks. The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional…
Comment linking /books-and-events/books/
on “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”Submitted Marcus compressed all human knowledge into one word as a story · 9 points
HN discussionRead: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ tldr from memory: Guy used 2 legitimately purchased gift cards that had been tampered and their codes were used by someone else. His account was locked with no recurse. I think he could still use his phone, but all the online stuff were locked down. He only managed to get it back after his case reached this website(hn) and senior Apple people stepped in.
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Passkeys are a trap”Submitted Anti-pornography lobby forces small gamedevs off storefronts as a story · 8 points
HN discussionHis iPhone could not sync, update, install new software, or send messages, nor could he sign out and use a new apple ID with it to restore that functionality. For a phone, this is effectively bricked. Paris uses the term "bricked" in the original post: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?”Submitted (Gradient) Descent into Mediocrity as a story · 5 points
HN discussionGift cards: it's a steal, so just say no. I want to say if you get one from your sister-in-law give it back but now I'm afraid she'll face terrible consequences from cashing it out. ... note an update on this story: Paris got his account unblocked today, thanks to the story being covered here and throughout the blogosphere. It's a good outcome but not a path open to most people: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?”Submitted The Empty Promise of AI-Generated Creativity as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThat linked story is pretty horrifying too: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ If he can't get his account back in any reasonable amount of time what chance do I have? (I see I missed a big HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 - 1038 comments)
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Yep, Passkeys Still Have Problems”Submitted In narrative games, constraints are the point as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYes. https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Bugs Apple Loves”Submitted No AI data centres in my backyard, please as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ > The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Bugs Apple Loves”Submitted Our 2D game character grew 3% taller every time he walked as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis might be why Apple Gift cards can lock you out of iCloud [1] since they are using a 3rd party. People at Apple who are intermediaries have strict rules not to unlock due to fraud and those processes can’t be undone easily? [1] https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “The gift card accountability sink”Submitted Beyond Bad Output: The Deeper Problems with AI in Creative Work as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ This guy purchased a gift card which turned out to be dodgy, and Apple locked his entire account. So there's definitely some kind of shenanigans possible with the current supply chain.
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “The gift card accountability sink”Submitted Beyond Bad Output as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is the original blogpost https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ The reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/theprimeagen/comments/1plv44v/20_ye... Please update the link in the post
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, Thanks to Apple”https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my…
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Update 18 December 2025: Apple ID Unblocked by Apple Executive Relations”"20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple" by Paris Buttfield-Addison: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card”I've been so tempted to try out the apple password manager, I'm fully vested in their ecosystem, but the lock in is too big for me to feel comfortable with. This is the sort of stuff that terrifies me https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
Comment linking /posts/appleid/
on “Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?”
